On July 31, 2001, for the first time in its history, the New York Stock Exchange began trading three unlisted securities. The DIA, SPY, and QQQ are the most actively traded Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) and are listed on the American Stock Exchange. On April 15, 2002 another 27 ETFs followed....

Short sellers are known to have private information about security prices. Empirical evidence of short selling, however, is based on only half of short sellers' trading activity; specifically, the opening of the position. Using disclosed large short position data from the Japanese stock market,...

We examine product differentiation in the high-frequency trading (HFT) industry, where the “products” are secretive proprietary trading strategies. We demonstrate how principal component analysis can be used to detect underlying strategies that are common to multiple HFT firms, and show that...

The total effect of a regulatory change consists of direct effects and indirect effects (spillovers), but the standard difference-in-difference approach measures only direct effects and ignores potential indirect effects. By examining the short-sale aggressiveness during the 2007 full repeal of...

We analyze the choice between public and private equity financing of a unique, hand-collected sample of privately held firms that have indicated their willingness to raise outside equity. We document that these firms are remarkably similar at the time of the announcement, yet 71% complete an...

This paper investigates an important feature of market design: pre-trade transparency, defined as the availability of information about pending trading interest in the market. We look at how the NYSE s introduction of OpenBook, which enables traders off the exchange floor to observe depth in the...

Using a broad panel of NYSE-listed stocks between 1983 and 2004, we study the relation between institutional shareholdings and the relative informational efficiency of prices, measured as deviations from a random walk. Stocks with greater institutional ownership are priced more efficiently and...

We provide an easy method to identify purchases and sales initiated by retail investors using recent, widely available U.S. equity transactions data. Individual stocks with net buying by retail investors outperform stocks with negative imbalances by approximately 10 basis points over the...

Using multiple short sale measures, we examine the predictive power of short sales for future stock returns in 38 countries from July 2006 to December 2014. We find that the days-to-cover ratio and utilization ratio measures have the most robust predictive power for future stock returns in the...

We study the information content in monthly short interest using NYSE-, AMEX-, and NASDAQ-listed stocks from 1988 to 2005. We show that stocks with relatively high short interest subsequently experience negative abnormal returns, but the effect can be transient and of debatable economic...